Low-impact Hydro

To most people the phrase ‘hydro scheme’ conjures up an image of a large curved concrete dam and a flooded glen.  And certainly all of the very large ones are like this.

But that is not what babyHydro is about.  Our interest, and we hope yours, is in ‘run-of-river’ hydro opportunities where their is no reservoir, simply a weir across the river to enable a portion of the water to be extracted to power a discretely sited turbine before returning the water to the river a little bit downstream.

Very often the weir will already exist; a vestage of a time gone by where it was built to extract water into a lade to power a traditional waterwheel.  And even if a weir has to be built it is unlikely to be more than about 1.5 metre high, and certainly designed to be fish friendly.

Power Output

The power available from a river is a function of the volume of water available (rate of flow) and the ‘head’ (the drop in height between the intake at the weir and the turbine down below).  Two other factor impact on this;

      a)    We do not take all of the water out of the river – there is a defined volume of flow left in to ensure that the river stays healthy during days of low rainfall

      b)    The system will only be producing power when the river is in spate – that is when it is raining or it is winter; just when maximum electricity is required

The purpose of the dam and reservoir in the larger schemes is to provide power over a longer period of time.

Size Bands

The definition of size bands is across hydro is a little vague.  We use the following:

The strength and interest of babyHydro covers the range 15kW to 500kW.  However, we do make use of Hydrobot to identify larger schemes for landowners and developers, and we provide assistance to people wishing to create their own schemes as a partial DIY project under 15kW